"CAB" 2007 Obituary

CABEL o@ca.on.grey_county.owen_sound.the_sun_times 2007-01-03 published
McKETRICK,
William "
Bill"
At Lee Manor on Sunday, December 31, 2006 in his 77th year. Sadly
missed by his son Bill and his wife Chris of Port Elgin, and
by Erin and Ryan. Also missed by his sister Lulu
RAAFLAUB of
Barrie and by many nieces and nephews. Predeceased by his father
WilliamGeorge, his mother Mary (née
CABEL) and by his sister
Mabel SAINT_DENIS.
Bill served in the Royal Canadian Navy from
1949-1954. Memorial donations to the Canadian Cancer Society
would be appreciated and may be made through the Tannahill Funeral
Home (519-376-3710). A private family service has been held.
Cremation Flesherton Crematorium.

CABLE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-11-17 published
Pianist was the 'Chopin of Ragtime' and a master of all musical
genres
As a composer, his music was heard on Polka Dot Door as well
as daily on Morningside. As a performer, he made more than 60
albums. 'He was one of those naturals'
By Lisa FITTERMAN,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Page S11
By all rights and the laws of human physiology, John
ARPIN should
never have been a pianist. His hands seemed too small, with short,
delicate fingers that somehow spanned not only octaves but whole
musical genres, from classical and opera to Broadway, the Beatles
and ragtime.
Couple those hands with an encyclopedic general knowledge of
music, add the gift of the gab, and you had a consummate entertainer
who, over the course of half a century, released no less than
67 recordings and often engaged his audiences in impromptu history
lessons about what he would play.
"You really felt you were part of a John Arpin performance, rather
than just an observer," said Howard
CABLE, who gave the pianist
one of his earliest professional gigs back in 1956 as part of
a band playing at the General Motors show at the Canadian National
Exhibition in Toronto.
"I hired him as a sub but soon realized that I'd better keep
him on full-time because he was terrific," Mr.
CABLE recalled.
"He may have been young but he was confident beyond his years.
I don't know how he was so confident. I remember asking him where
he was from. When he said 'Port McNicoll,' well, I said that
I didn't think anyone came from there. But he was one of those
naturals, I guess, destined to become a star."
Georgian Bay Boyhood
John ARPIN grew up in Port McNicoll, Ontario, where he was the
second of Elie and Marie
ARPIN's two sons. His parents ran a
general store in the little Georgian Bay town that was once known
as "the Chicago of Canada" for its shipping and grain-handling
facilities, and instilled in their children both their devout
Catholic faith (his mother attended church every day) and their
love of music.
Mr. ARPIN often spoke of a gift his parents gave him for Christmas
when he was a teenager: a recording of a Puccini opera. At first,
he looked on the gift askance. Opera? For him? To make his parents
happy, or at least keep them at bay, he played it. It wasn't
half-finished before he was crying like a baby and asking for
more.
His introduction to piano was through his brother, Leo, who was
10 years older and started to take lessons when his sibling was
still a toddler. As Leo banged out chords and scales, little
John mimicked the sounds. Soon, he was picking out tunes, displaying
an innate musicality, a perfect pitch and the sense of storytelling
that would help him to become one of the most beloved and admired
pianists of his generation.
By the time he was a teenager, he'd learned everything he could
from the few piano teachers in the region, and his mother began
accompanying him on long weekly bus trips to Toronto so that
he could continue his studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music.
"It couldn't have been easy on her," remarked Mr.
ARPIN's wife,
Mary Jane ESPLEN. "
John's mother had a sensitive stomach and
apparently, she would be sick all the way down and all the way
back. But she was devoted and believed in her son's talent."
Indeed, when her son expressed an interest in becoming a doctor
and even insisted on studying medicine for a short time, his
mother was dead set against it. "You're too emotional to do that,"
she told him repeatedly. "You're too sensitive."
In a way, she was right, for Mr.
ARPIN was not the kind of man
to keep things bottled up inside. He was the opposite of stoic,
and had a tendency to cry at the drop of a hat. "He didn't have
to maintain a strong outer front," continued Dr.
ESPLEN, a clinician
and scientist at the University of Toronto. "He loved a lot of
things that most men wouldn't be caught dead doing, things such
as picking out flowers, shopping for groceries and even for clothes
for me. And he listened. Oh, how he listened.
"You know, he would have made a wonderful psychiatrist."
Conservatory Graduation
At 16, Mr.
ARPIN graduated from the conservatory, continuing
his studies at University of Toronto before embarking on a career
during which the American jazz great Eubie Blake called him "the
Chopin of Ragtime." After his stint with Mr.
CABLE's band, he
began in the 1960s to perform with his trio and as a soloist
in Toronto bars and hotel lounges; bespectacled and with a Prince
Valiant haircut, he entertained patrons with a repertoire that
- besides ragtime - featured classics, stride piano, bebop, traditional
jazz and film and stage tunes.
In the late 1960s, he joined CTV as the network's music director,
and in 1976, he became the first Canadian to make a "direct-to-disc"
recording, then a new kind of album where the entire side was
cut in one take. RCA producer Jack Feeney explained at the
time that such recordings required musicians who performed perfectly,
and that Mr.
ARPIN was the perfect choice - "a definitive pianist,
one who plays crisply and with very few mistakes."
Throughout the 1970s, his composition Jogging Along was the theme
song for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio program
Morningside, while "John Arpin Sundays" at the McMichael Gallery
in Kleinberg, Ontario, were much-anticipated weekly events over
a period of 20 years.
In 1984, he moved to TVOntario as writer, director and performer
for the station's beloved children's program Polka Dot Door.
On camera, he was a natural, interacting with the stuffed animal
characters Humpty, Dumpty, Marigold and Bear with a childlike
wonder, zest and curiosity.
He was always a fixture at concerts and summer festivals throughout
Southern Ontario, and he toured the rest of the world whenever
time allowed, building an international reputation as a consummate
professional who always put his own spin on whatever he was playing.
'Know The Lyrics'
"Know the lyrics," he was wont to say to artists he mentored.
In other words, they had to understand and tease out the story
of a piece of music through the language of cadence and melody,
whether or not there were actual lyrics to follow.
Alongside his own prolific concert and recording career, Mr.
ARPIN
served as music director and accompanist to both Canadian contralto
Maureen Forrester and to actress-singer Louise Pitre, who made
an international splash in her 2001 Broadway debut as Donna Sheridan
in Mamma Mia! At times, he also acted as music arranger for artists
such as Tommy Hunter and Roy Payne.
His recordings ranged the gamut from ragtime through to the music
of Andrew Lloyd Webber, honky-tonk, spirituals and tango. He
did three albums with Ms. Forrester, an instrumental album that
featured the music of singer-composer Gordon Lightfoot, another
of ARPIN at the Opera, The Complete Piano Works of Scott Joplin
and seven linked CDs of popular nostalgic tunes.
Throughout his career, he garnered two Juno nominations, won
the 1998 Scott Joplin Award from a Missouri foundation dedicated
to the preservation of ragtime and was awarded first prize out
of 450 entrants in the Yamaha Second International Original Concert
Series in Tokyo, this for his composition Lyric Suite for Piano,
Strings and Percussion.
Mr. ARPIN parlayed his indefatigable energy into his personal
life, too. An avid collector of sheet music and Nippon china,
he often "You'd never not know that John was in the room for
he was always working it, asking questions and entertaining,"
said Dr. ESPLEN, whom he married in 1990 in New Orleans. "It
didn't matter what walk of life you were from. He was such an
authentic presence."
The couple first met in 1986 at a piano lounge in Toronto, when
Dr. ESPLEN asked him to play several obscure Scott Joplin songs.
Their Friendship gradually turned to love and in 1990, they married
- he for the third time - at their good friend Al Rose's home
in New Orleans. As Mr. Rose, the noted jazz historian and impresario,
escorted the bride down the aisle, Mr.
ARPIN played An Affair
to Remember on the piano.
Dr. ESPLEN, whose parents owned an antique store, got her husband
interested in collecting Nippon china. He took to it so eagerly
that she sometimes regretted not encouraging him to collect stamps,
which would have been easier to store. "Let me just say that
after say the third or fourth new china cabinet I began to get
a little worried," she wrote in her blog. "Over the years, we
moved on beyond cocoa sets to tea sets and plates, and humidors,
and nut sets and juice sets and platters and celery sets… need
I say more?"
She was the family accountant, keeping track of purchases and
finances because Mr.
ARPIN wasn't terribly interested in such
things. "He was a real live-for-today kind of guy," she remarked.
He was a loving father to his three surviving children from his
first two marriages, while his deep faith got him through the
tragedy of the death of a son from sudden infant death syndrome
and his own diagnosis a number of years ago of a rare, inoperable
and slow-acting form of intestinal cancer.
For Mr. ARPIN, life itself was music, in all its terrible beauty.
And he was listening to it right up until the end, including
his own Blue Gardenia album of Latin tempo songs and one of his
all-time favourites, Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal's I'll Be Seeing
You.
JohnFrancisOscarARPIN was born on December 3, 1936, in Port
McNicoll, Ontario He died at home on November 8, 2007, after
a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 70. He leaves his brother,
Leo ARPIN, his wife, Mary Jane
ESPLEN, and his children Bob,
Jennifer and Nadine. He also leaves grandchildren Alexander,
Nicole, Kurt and Brianna.

CABOTT o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-06-14 published
CLARKE,
AlanMartin
(August 1, 1929-June 12, 2007)
After a full and wonderful life, and a long struggle with Parkinson's
Disease, Alan died in Toronto on June 12, 2007 at the age of
77. Alan cherished his family, and will be forever missed by
his beloved children Andrew (Lucy
VANOLDENBARNEVELD,)
Beth
(LauraCABOTT,)
Jeffrey
(JaneRUPERT,) and Matthew Devlin (Alexandra
KIRBY,) his granddaughters, Ella and Grace, and Margot, his wife
of 40 years. He leaves behind his brother Edgar (Betty), his
sisters, Mary (Haruo
KAWAI,)
Harriet
(JacobENNS) and Margaret
(Sidney TJEPKEMA, his sister-in-law, Vicki
BRODDY, and many nieces,
nephews and life-long Friends. The
son of Emily
(EDGAR) and Lorne
CLARKE,
Alan was born in Stratford, spent his early years in
Sudbury and his childhood and teenage years in Ottawa South.
He graduated from Glebe Collegiate Institute and Victoria College,
University of Toronto with a bachelor's degree in philosophy
and ethics. Alan dedicated his life to social change through
adult education, and community development. He was also a committed
advocate for human rights. In the 1950s he spent several summers
as a labourer/teacher and then supervisor for Frontier College
beginning a lifelong interest in fostering adult literacy. He
worked for ten years with the Young Men's Christian Association
at various branches in Toronto. In 1958 he was the founder and
first director of The Centre for Adult Education at the North
Toronto branch which led to the founding of York University in
1959. From 1960 to 1966 he was Executive Director of the Canadian
Citizenship Council and concurrently, for three years, of the
Canadian Centenary Council. His next challenge was as the first
Executive Director of the Company of Young Canadians, 1966 to
1968. He began a fifteen year tenure at Algonquin College in
1970 as the Director of the Demonstration Project in Community
Development and then as the Director of Continuing Education.
In 1985-86 he was Advisor to the Canadian Emergency Coordinator
for the African Famine. The last ten years of his formal working
career were as Communications Advisor for the International Joint
Commission. Throughout his working life and as a volunteer in
retirement, Alan worked with many local, national and international
organizations, contributing, among others, to Project 4000, the
Movement for Canadian Literacy, and the United Nations Association
in Canada. He was a contributing author to 'Strong and Free:
a Response to the War Measures Act', in 1970. Alan's family would
like to express a great debt of thanks to the 3rd and 4th floor
staff at the North York Seniors Health Centre, especially Lidia
and Mary-Helene. The family would also like to thank Estelle
REED for the love and care she provided in Alan's last years.
A memorial service celebrating Alan's life and legacy will be
held in Ottawa at the First Unitarian Congregation, 30 Cleary
Avenue, on Sunday June 17, at 3: 30 p.m. In lieu of flowers, donations
may be made in Alan's memory to the Parkinson Society of Ottawa,
1053 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, K1Y 4E9.

CABRAL o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-09-13 published
WALKER,
MaryJane "M.J." (née
CORBET)
(January 7, 1939-September 9, 2007)
Passed away peacefully in the QE II Health Science Centre, Halifax.
Born in Toronto on January 7, 1939, she was a daughter of Richard
and Mildred
CORBET.
Sadly missed by daughter, Heather
MacIVOR
son-in-law, Kendal
McKINNEY,
Windsor,Ontario; husband, David
WALKER,
Halifax; sister, Ann
GRANT, Toronto; niece, Linda
CABRAL,
Kettleby, Ontario; nephews, Stephen
QUARTZ, Malibu, California
David QUARTZ,
ChiangMai,Thailand. M.J. loved life in Nova Scotia
and was a prominent patron of the Halifax arts community for
almost forty years. She was a dedicated volunteer for the Junior
League of Halifax, Neptune Theatre, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia,
Dandie Dinmont Terrier Club of Canada, and many others. M.J.'s
many Friends will miss her sparkling wit and her sense of style.
Her curiosity and love of travel took her all over the world,
from photographic safaris in East and South Africa to the Yangtze
River Valley in China. She was an avid card player and reader
of Canadian literature. Donations in memory of M.J. may be made
to the Neptune Theatre Foundation. In accordance with her wishes,
no funeral service will be held. Arrangements are entrusted to
J.A. Snow Funeral Home. E-mail condolences may be made to: condolences.snow@ca.ns.aliantzinc.ca